Canada can solve nursing shortage
Thousands of internationally trained workers languishing in other jobs due to bureaucracy
Lately, it’s impossible to pick up a newspaper, look at social media or turn on the news without hearing about the crisis in health-care staffing — burnt-out workers, understaffed ICUs, nurses doing double shifts.
As an ICU/ER nurse who also teaches nursing, I feel the impact of the nursing shortage every day. As a nurse, I feel furious that a big part of the solution is staring us squarely in the face.
Recently, the Ontario government announced a plan to get some internationally educated nurses (IENs) working in hospitals and long-term care while they complete their Ontario registration.
While that sounds like progress, at this time it will only put about 300 IENs into the system in roughly 50 hospitals.
That’s just a drop in the bucket. The Ontario Nurses’ Association says our province is short more than 22,000 nurses and has the worst RN-to-population ratio in the country.
Short-term solutions are not enough. We need a comprehensive, sustainable human resources strategy to shore up those working the front lines — today and well into the future.
Right now, in Ontario, some 15,000 IENs — who trained, qualified and practiced in other countries, and came to Canada wanting to practice nursing — are working their way through an agonizingly complex qualification process of courses, document-gathering, competency testing and examinations. Some have been in that pipeline for years. No doubt others have given up or taken their talents elsewhere.
Let me give you a couple of examples from my own professional circles.
One of my colleagues, with 20 years of experience practicing and teaching nursing — and a PhD in nursing — has been trying for three years to get her licence to practice in Ontario. It’s taken that long, after many rounds of providing documentation, testimonials from her university and waiting for answers, just to be scheduled to sit the registration exam. And that’s not even the final step, since there’s another exam to be taken before she can practice her profession in Ontario.
Qualifying isn’t the only barrier. A group of 26 IENs has taken to social media to tell their story: despite earning their Ontario qualifications, they cannot practice in Ontario — because the federal government hasn’t approved their immigration status. The backlog is so large that some of these nurses have been waiting years for approval — working as nannies, caregivers and whatever other job they can get, with no indication of when they can expect to be approved to do the job they came here to do.
No one is suggesting that nursing standards should be relaxed or quality of care compromised to help IENs qualify. Yet we seem to accept the idea that hospitals can run short-staffed or double the number of ICU patients assigned to a nurse, or ask nurses to work 16-hour shifts, without compromising the quality of care they deliver.
This crisis didn’t happen overnight: it was well underway when COVID-19 hit, and it won’t go away when the pandemic ends. We have an aging population with growing health care needs, and a shrinking pool of nurses to take care of us.
I’m furious that in the midst of this crisis, Ontario has thousands of IENs working as nannies, clerks, factory workers and Uber drivers. If that makes you furious, make your voice heard. Join the growing numbers who are taking to social media, writing their MPPs, their MPs and the media. Tell them there’s a long-term solution to the nursing shortage and it’s spelled I-E-N.